S Chandrasekhar


Born on October 19, 1910 in Lahore, British India, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an astrophysicist, was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for his mathematical theory of black holes. He was nephew of C.V. Raman. He spent the greater part of his professional life in the United States, and became a US citizen in 1953. 

His mathematical treatment of stellar evolution yielded many of the current theoretical models of the later evolutionary stages of massive stars and black holes.  His most celebrated work concerns the radiation of energy from stars, particularly white dwarf stars, which are the dying fragments of stars. 

The Chandrasekhar limit is named after him. He showed that the mass of a white dwarf could not exceed 1.44 times that of the Sun – the Chandrasekhar limit. 

Chandrasekhar studied at Presidency College, Madras  and the University of Cambridge. He worked as a professor at the University of Chicago for several decades. He died on August 21, 1995, at the age of 82 in Chicago.

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